It's ironic that the Harper government's so-called 'advocacy chill' has now reached PEN, the writers' organization devoted to revealing the pitfalls of censorship.

If Prime Minister Stephen Harper wants to understand the long-term consequences of official censorship, he’d do well to pay close attention to what PEN has been advocating for almost a century, writes John Lorinc.

By:John Lorinc Published on Thu Jul 24 2014

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many Western governments found themselves grappling with the increasingly outspoken anti-globalization movement, which was, in many ways, the precursor to the Occupy/G20 protests of recent years.

Canada had two significant encounters: the first, in late 1997, during a trade-oriented gathering of the heads of the APEC nations in Vancouver; and the second, in Quebec City in 2001, for the third “summit of the Americas.”

At the APEC conference, officials in the office of Prime Minister Jean Chretien asked the RCMP to remove protesters who objected to the presence of the Indonesian dictator Suharto. The government’s attempt to silence the demonstrators triggered a lengthy controversy, culminating in a 1999 parliamentary inquiry.

Two years later, during the Quebec City summit, the federal government again erected a heavy security cordon meant to keep anti-globalization protesters away from where the state leaders were meeting.

During both episodes, PEN Canada — which today finds itself on the business end of an audit into its “political” activities — took strong public positions about Ottawa’s role in suppressing the right to freedom of expression of not just the demonstrators, but also a prominent reporter covering the APEC protests. Throughout this period, PEN never paused to game out the practical implications of its positions because the government of the day wasn’t threatening charitable organizations engaged in public interest advocacy with costly and censorious audits.

I served on the PEN board at the time (as national affairs chair) and I vividly remember the impassioned debates we had internally about our response. PEN’s primary mandate is to advocate for writers imprisoned or oppressed by dictatorial regimes. The organization is best known for its work on behalf of figures like author Salman Rushdie, as well its advocacy of domestic legal issues such as libel chill against journalists and authors.

But we decided we had an obligation to express our objection to the government’s actions, in a way that was consistent with our statement of purpose. The decision wasn’t taken lightly: PEN worked closely with federal foreign affairs ministers to advance our advocacy of human rights in international fora. And at the time, one board member, the author and political consultant Warren Kinsella, was working as an adviser to the Chrétien government.

Despite those connections, the PEN board came out with principled positions condemning the RCMP for its actions against the demonstrators in Vancouver and later in Quebec.

In the years since, PEN Canada has continued its national affairs advocacy, for example criticizing the Harper government for its attempts to muzzle scientists as well as an over-reaching online crime bill. But unlike the late 1990s and early 2000s, when PEN was free — and I use that word advisedly — to determine the tenor of its positions, the current board will inevitably find itself wondering whether its future campaigns will invite harassment in the guise of tax enforcement.

Because PEN is a writers’ organization, I’d say it’s appropriate to describe its current plight as profoundly Kafka-esque. Institutionally, PEN has an encyclopedic knowledge of the overt and subtle techniques that totalitarian governments deploy to harass critics and cut off their oxygen supply. And it’s not always about throwing writers and journalists in jail. There are myriad other ways to achieve similar ends, and PEN Canada (along with other groups) was absolutely correct in identifying the government’s campaign against Canada’s scientists and environmental advocacy groups as salient examples.

Now, in a richly ironic twist, PEN must add its experiences with “advocacy chill” to this long, shameful list, and do so at the moment when the Harper regime is noisily, and hypocritically, decrying human rights abuses by Russia.

But this story is far from over, as anyone who’s ever advocated for freedom of expression well knows. Every publisher understands that when someone calls for a book to be removed from a reading list or censored in some other way, sales take off and audiences grow. Humans are drawn inexorably towards forbidden ideas.

Ideas, as history has shown on countless occasions, are impossible to suppress. Indeed, if Harper wants to understand the long-term consequences of official censorship, he’d do well to pay close attention to what PEN, and freedom of expression organizations like it, have been advocating for almost a century.

The Tories ignore those lessons at their political peril.

John Lorinc is a Toronto urban affairs journalist. He was PEN Canada’s national affairs chair from 1997 to 2001.

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